Email

Please visit http://itd.ncsu.edu for official documentation.

IMAP and Disk Space

Your NC State e-mail address lasts you the duration of your stay at NC State. You are allotted 50 MB of storage space for your e-mails. This is in addition to your 50 MB AFS disk quota (ie. personal account space in the Andrews File System) also allotted for your stay at NC State. For more information regarding NCSU email, feel free to visit the IMAP at NC State webpage. Although file storage space starts at 50MB, space allocation can be adjusted and more can be bought. By simply going to the SysNews web site and logging in to "User Info," Unity computing account holders can click on "Quota Manager" and increase their total quota allocation to 300 megabytes. ITD staff expect to make more quota available to Unity account holders in the coming months as they assess and analyze usage patterns for the new system.

Checking IMAP quota

Its always fun to try and figure out where all of your IMAP quota has dissappeared to. Here's a couple of ways to check that:

• ITD IMAP Checker -- http://sysnews.ncsu.edu/tools-bin/imap-usagequery
• IMAPSize, Windows freeware application.

Email Clients

Setup instructions for the most popular email clients can be found here.

Filtering / SPAM

The most common way for people to get viruses today is through e-mail. Virus coders will write a program so that it looks up all the contacts in your address book and proceed to e-mail itself to these people as an attachment. Anti-Virus software typically auto-scans any e-mail attachment you may receive. However, it is often a good idea to double check this if you are unsure of the results of the scan. For more information regarding anti-virus software, please visit Wolftech's anti-virus website.

Your university e-mail also comes with a handy defense tool: Pure Message. Pure Message is a mail filtering agent that attempts to identify spam and viruses by using text analysis and predetermined definitions. Pure Message has various ways of dealing with viruses and spam and handles each email differently, based on it's their individual 'hit' percentages. For example, Pure Message adds one or both of it's detection headers to an email (based on the hit percentage), which makes filtering easier. Pure Message will strip any legitimate message of any virus that may be present and deliver the clean email. Any unlegitimate email messages (ie. virus-generated) will be removed from your inbox completely. It is important to note that Pure Message does not delete spam. For more information regarding Pure Message, including ways to improve its effectiveness, visit the Pure Message webpage.

For a history on the term spam and its usage, please visit this history of spam.

For specific information on configuration of certain e-mail clients, we highly reccommend Resnet's Email Setup page.

NOTE: We need to build our own version of these pages.

NOTE: New Unity accounts created as of May 2nd, 2006 will have a new spam filtering system in place. Any incoming email that has been tagged by PureMessage as spam (X-Spam-Flag: YES) will be automatically routed into a "SPAM" folder in the user's IMAP account. The user can then easily browse the filtered mail and delete it at their leisure. In addition, the accounts will have an email message inserted that explains the SPAM folder, how it should be used, and other links to useful information.

Attachments

Any message which has an identified virus attached will be removed, and neither the virus nor the message delivered.

Messages with unscannable attachments, or where the virus status of the attachment cannot be verified, will continue to be delivered with the warning message attached as they had been previously.

This change should affect an extremely small portion of mail, but enough hopefully to improve service on the email system. For any questions regarding the change, please contact the Helpdesk at 515-HELP.

Sizes

Maximum email message size is 15MB -- this will limit the size of attachments that can be sent via NCSU email to just *under* 15MB.

Types

In an attempt to streamline the mail process and protect users from malicious mail messages, attachments sent to campus Unity accounts in the following formats:

• .exe
• .pif
• .dll
• .lnk
• .scr

will no longer be delivered to users as of Wednesday, July 5th. Users who need to send files of this type should put the files into an archive (such as Zip) before they send the file.

Bounces

On July 1, 2006, ITD Systems will be changing the way that over quota Unity email accounts are handled.

Currently, when a Unity email account goes over quota, new message delivery is retried every 30 minutes for 3 days. After 3 days, the message is returned to the sender with an "undeliverable" error.

For those accounts that have been continuously over quota for 30 days, the message will be rejected immediately, and the sender will be informed that the recipient account is not being used.

This is intended as a courtesy to the sender, who will then be able to immediately pursue other contact methods.

Starting on July 1st, folks who send email to Unity account holders who have been over their allocated quota for 30 days or more will have their email returned to them immediately, instead of after the normal 3-day waiting period, with a message indicating that the account is not being used. Account holders affected by this policy have several choices available to them:

1. Lower their usage below their quota
2. purchase additional quota: https://sysnews.ncsu.edu/tools-bin/usmdb-quota
3. have their Unity email forwarded to another address: http://help.ncsu.edu/solutions/all/22.php

For more information about this change, please contact the NC State University Help Desk at help@ncsu.edu or 515-HELP(4357).

Vacation Message

One of the server-side filters can also be used to take certain steps when you will be away from your email for an extended period of time. Commonly called a "vacation" message, this functionality can let you notify email correspondents of your absence, possibly giving them an alternate contact or date for your return.

Important notes about this functionality:

• You can determine how often a vacation message will be sent back to someone.
• By defining this period of time, no matter how many emails someone sends you, they will only receive one reply from the system. For example, if you'll be gone for 2 weeks, you can set the interval for 7 days. Should someone email you during the first and second week, they will only receive one "vacation message" each week. Any additional emails they send you after the first will not result in a reply to them. This will prevent you from "spamming" people who send you a lot of emails while you're away.
• You must remember to manually turn the vacation email OFF when you get back.
• There is no way to set a date to automatically start or end these messages.
• Vacation emails will NOT be sent in reply to emails received from mailing lists.

See Email:Vacation Messages for details.

Mail Forwarding

Unity/Eos account holders can have their e-mail forwarded to a different e-mail account. We have implemented a new system to manage email forwarding from your Unity account. The new system is a part of the USMDB system that you already use to manage your file space quotas.

The features of the new system are:

• Self-Service - anyone with a current Unity account can setup, edit, or remove their forward at any time.

• Address Validation - The destination address must be validated before it will be used for a forward. The system will send a confirmation email to the requested address, to verify that address can receive mail from NCSU.

• Renewals - All forwards must be renewed every 12 months. This is done to make sure the forward is still being used by the account holder. You will receive a renewal reminder on the 1st and the 15th of the month before your account expires. Renewals are be completed by simply clicking on the link sent in the renewal reminder message.

• Expirations - Forwards no longer require an expiration date. You can use an expiration date to setup a temporary forward if you like. Permanent forwards will never expire, so long as they are renewed annually, as mentioned above.

The new Email Forward Manager Tool is located here: https://sysnews.ncsu.edu/tools-bin/usmdb-forwards and can also be found from the SysNews Homepage, under System Tools, E-Mail Tools, USMDB - Email Forward Manager.

For more information about USMDB and the new Email Forward Manager, see the User SMDB FAQ, found at: http://itdapps.ncsu.edu/smdbwiki/index.php/USMDB:FAQ

Spam email will not be forwarded to your offsite email address. For more information on that, please visit our Spam: Forwarding Policy page.

Email Alias

The naming convention on campus for faculty and staff aliases is firstname_lastname.ncsu.edu when this does not conflict with an existing alias. Aliases not conforming to this convention may be created if they

• have more than 8 characters
• or contain an underscore

To setup an alias, send a message to accounts@ncsu.edu with the following information:

1. the alias you would like to have (usually firstname_lastname@ncsu.edu)
2. your actual full Internet email address
3. the NC State department or unit with which you are affiliated

Notification will be returned to you via email, usually within a few hours. There are no fees are charged for this service.